Google Chrome Reviews

Privacy Issues

If you are concerned about privacy, Chrome is not the best option. Period. Google tracks everything you do in order to customize the ads displayed to you. Their ads are everywhere (email inbox, websites etc). They might know you more than you do. In this case, Firefox is the way to go.
If you don't mind having your life tracked, then Chrome is better overall.

Don't believe the benchmarks

Chrome is not a horrible browser, but what bugs me quite often is how many publications praise its performance. The reason for this is, I believe, the way in which people measure performance. They usually have certain websites and tools to collect metrics – but those are run in a single tab. What has become annoyingly obvious to me with prolonged use of Chrome, is that it deals very poorly with increasing numbers of tabs.

With many open tabs, let's say one or two dozen, Chrome's interface will start breaking down and behaving inconsistently. Not just scrolling and clicking in websites can have delays or 5 to 10 seconds, but the Chrome window itself will start showing the same behaviour. It can take many seconds for Chrome to close a tab of open its menu after you click, and choosing context menu options becomes a test of patience. It won't usually bring up the crashed tab prompt anymore. At some point, the interface might stop responding entirely. It will still be reactive, showing mouse-over effects and such, but clicks won't have an effect any longer. The usual disclaimer applies: this is not a problem with my system, an extension, or particular version of Chrome. I've witnessed it across many Chrome versions over the years, after a clean install, on Windows, Mac, and Linux systems.

This is really quite baffling because one of the features Chrome advertises is its multi-process architecture, that for example prevents a crashing tab from crashing the entire browser. Firefox only started implementing something similar very recently, but it never had those problems with large numbers of tabs. Firefox has its own memory consumption and performance problems, of course. But even with several hundreds of tabs, it doesn't show such an extreme drop in performance. I've once experimented by having a Firefox session with well over a thousand tabs, and it didn't perceivably slow down the browser! Only after many hours of use I started noticing some sluggishness, but in the same way that it happens with Firefox when running just a few tabs. And even if it did croak, you can always close Firefox, use its very reliable session restore functionality to have all the tabs back open (the recovery takes about half a minute with 1000+ tabs, by the way), and Firefox will only lazy-load tabs to memory as they are activated again, so it remains fast for a long time, while Chrome seems to insist on always loading everything at once.

On paper, Firefox should be architecturally less prepared to deal with a large number of tabs. So I can only conclude that, at least in this aspect, the programmers working on Firefox are a lot more skilled than whatever engineers Google hired for Chrome. Firefox's code is of immensely higher quality in this regard.

So this is something to consider if you like working with a lot of tabs, like me. Firefox will let you, Chrome will crash and burn.

Good and honest feedback, I use firefox myself as my main browser for everything especially heavy browsing, and chrome for coding.
There is extension that will help you if you want to use chrome with many tabs it's called The Great Suspender, give it a try.

Thanks for the suggestion, I'm definitely going to give that a try soon! The description of the extension sounds promising.

You'll probably need another extension (if it exists) for how Chrome handles tabs in the UI, if you really want to work with a lot of them. Firefox has a minimum width for tab riders which will keep part of their title visible, and display the overflow in a drop-down menu of all tabs. In Chrome, on the other hand, tab riders keep getting narrower until they become impossible to distinguish and hard to click, and there is no overflow menu, the tabs that don't fit on the screen will just be invisible until the number of open tabs drops again.

I was a die-hard Chrome fan for quite a few years, but recently I've mostly switched over to the un-hyped browser Waterfox. For some reason, I've never really liked Firefox much but I really just mesh well with the style of Waterfox - if you're looking for a browser that can match or even surpass Google Chrome in quality and style, check out Waterfox and see how you like it.

If you're concerned with your privacy, I'd recommend another browser.

As many on here have mentioned, the main issue with Chrome is your Privacy. Google makes money off your personal data, such as browsing history, searches typed etc. I, like many people are not that keen on a private advertising company such as Google making money from our personal data and habits.

Scary that Google tracks and stores every single thing you read, click, and write to target YOU with better adverts. Even more scary is the snowden revelations that the USA government has access to all of that information too. Much prefer a browser like Firefox and Safari, which author doesn't track and store everything I do. Personally, I like Safari.

Unfortunately, Google's business model is to earn money through advertising by collecting information on us, which entails offering free software in exchange for information — https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/a-different-way-to-see-google-303df2011df0 — Apple's business model is to earn money on hardware and software, they have no financial incentive to be malicious with our information. Firefox is unfortunately in the middle, they have biddings on who get to be the default search engine.

I did not mention Chrome as FLOSS, and we think Apple does collect information about you. It may not use that for financial gains, but will share with Not So-secret Agency(NSA), with a tailored gag order in place Apple cannot disclose this information and we remain oblivious.
It has to follow the law of the land, other tech giants did this.
We know this thanks to Snowden leaks.

Finally we have FLOSS alternatives to replace and ensure some privacy.

AlternativeTo is a free service that helps you find better alternatives to the products you love and hate.

The site is made by Ola and Markus in Sweden, with a lot of help from our friends and colleagues in Italy, Finland, USA, Colombia, Philippines, France and contributors from all over the world. That's right, all the lists of alternatives are crowd-sourced, and that's what makes the data powerful and relevant.